Joseph P. Kennedy, III, son of former Congressman Joseph Kennedy, has announced he is running for retiring Congressman Barney Frank’s seat. Kennedy is a 31 year old local prosecutor and is definitely a step up from his malapropism-prone father‑‑Stanford undergrad, Harvard Law School, and no known scandals. He also has fire-red hair and is by far the most Irish-looking Kennedy to ever run for political office.

But don’t be fooled. The young Kennedy is also a committed Hispanderer. While at Harvard Law School, he did volunteer legal work for the left-wing Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, whose past volunteers include Deval Patrick and Michelle Obama. Kennedy worked exclusively with Boston-area Hispanics, many of whom were almost certainly illegal aliens.

After law school, Kennedy volunteered for the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic where he helped organize the Dominican tourism industry (I don’t get it either).[VDARE.com note: It was eco-tourism.] His supporters boast that his ability to speak fluent Spanish will allow him to outcampaign anyone for the Hispanic vote.

Joe Kennedy’s entrance into the congressional race is the only reason I can think of why Scott Brown, who is now up for reelection, recently called for expanding Irish immigration by admitting 10,500 skilled Irish workers every year on an E-3 Visa. [Brown Seeks More Work Visas For Irish, by Noah Bierman, Boston Globe, February 9, 2012]

The E-3 is two year visa currently only available to Australians. It also has a spousal provision, the E-3D visa, which allows a spouse to legally work here as well. They can also bring the kids. And, of course, any children born here will be citizen “anchor babies” under the current misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment. You can see how the numbers start to add up quickly.

This proposal is obviously unnecessary given that we already issue over 100,000 foreign work visas every month. So what is Scott Brown thinking?

If Kennedy is successfully portrayed as the Irish candidate, then Warren may be able to cling to his coattails. But by supporting expanded Irish immigration, Brown hopes to convince those who support Kennedy to also support him, because he’s pro-Irish too.

In many ways, former Boston Mayor James Michael Curley (1874-1958) invented modern “us” v “them” ethnic politics. Curley’s strategy was to foment imaginary grievances between Protestants and Irish Catholics for political advantage. He basically took English-Irish antagonisms and transported them across the Atlantic. It should surprise no one that James Michael Curley is the personal hero of former Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry, who has modeled his own ethnic politics after Curley’s. (Curley never smoked crack cocaine, but he did serve three prison terms while holding political office and yet still managed to get reelected.).

And, of course, Curley’s electoral strategy of systematically driving his Protestant opponents out of the city—known to political scientists as “The Curley Effect”—has obvious parallels to the Obama Administration’s determination to “Elect A New People” through continued mass immigration, Administrative Amnesty and crippled enforcement.

The irony is that in his personal life, James Michael Curley imitated the very people he accused of oppressing his constituents. He lived in an elegant colonial mansion in an exclusive WASPy neighborhood. He drove in a limousine, wore fancy clothes and peppered his speech with Latin and Greek references.

At a wedding my mother attended as a girl, she was fortunate enough to be seated at the same table as Mayor Curley. “He spoke like an Englishman and never stopped quoting Shakespeare,” she told me.

Our alienated malcontents—Joe Sobran called them “alienists”, the obverse of “nativists”—nurse a sense of inferiority toward the historic American nation that fuels their antipathy toward it. One might call it “anti-historic nation envy”. It is the cause of so many of the immigration-related problems we suffer from today.

But, like Curley, they often imitate the lifestyle of the establishment Americans they so bitterly resent. Many upper class Irish and upper class blacks have long carried a grudge against the Protestant establishment, but try to emulate it.

Thus Harvard-educated W.E.B. Du Bois, despite his professed identification with the souls of black folks, was an unabashed elitist who always wore gloves, carried a cane, and spoke in a Brahmin accent. Henry Louis Gates lives in an antique colonial home outside of Harvard Square, and can often be seen walking through Harvard Yard wearing an Inverness cape and also carrying a cane. Deval Patrick lives in a WASPy colonial mansion on the outskirts of Boston. You get the idea.

And when it comes to the Irish, no one can compete with the anti-historical nation envy of the Kennedys.

Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. was one of America’s richest men, and yet he had a deep-seated inferiority complex toward the Eastern Establishment he tried so very hard to emulate. The Kennedys lived abroad in England, summered on Cape Cod, and wintered in Palm Beach. Despite their professed Catholicism, Kennedy never sent his sons to Catholic school, but to prestigious Protestant boarding schools and Harvard University.

Best of all, this family has had the impudence to compare John F. Kennedy’s presidency to that most idyllic achievement of English folklore: “Camelot”.

Jackie Kennedy could not fathom how such a rich and privileged family could harbor such a sense of ethnic grievance. She told historian Arthur Schlesinger: “There seems to be about all these Irish, they always seem to have a sort of persecution thing about them, don`t they?”

They certainly do. To this very day, you can buy “No Irish Need Apply” signs at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library—even though there is little evidence that any such signs ever appeared in storefront windows anywhere.

And the most destructive legacy of Joseph Kennedy, Sr. was the seething anti-historic nation envy that he passed down the family tree.

In 1991, Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy, II boycotted Queen Elizabeth II’s historic address to Congress because of Great Britain’s “occupation of Northern Ireland.” In 1993, Bobby Kennedy’s daughter Courtney married the famous Irish martyr Paul Michael Hill of the Guildford Four. (Hill was wrongly imprisoned for allegedly participating in the Irish Republican Army’s bombing of two pubs in Guildford, England). In 1994, Ted Kennedy and his sister, then U.S. Ambassador to Ireland Jean Kennedy-Smith, arranged a travel visa for Sinn Fein Leader Gerry Adams to come to the United States to raise money for the Irish Republican cause.

Given the vast money, organization and name recognition young Joe Kennedy has inherited, he should be very tough to beat in the state’s most liberal district. But how will the Irish vote factor in?

The Massachusetts Irish vote isn’t what it used to be. Many voters who are another generation removed from Ireland, like myself, don’t have a very strong Irish identity.

But there are plenty of voters who still do, and some of them are three or four generations removed from the Old Country. Similarly, Joseph Kennedy, Sr.’s grandfather immigrated from Wexford, Ireland in 1849—and yet the Kennedys still manage to grind that ethnic axe more than a century and a half later.

For that matter, Mitt Romney’s career owes everything to the National Question—one of Ron Unz’s anti-bilingual education was on the ballot in Massachusetts when Romney ran for governor in 2002, and its unexpectedly sweeping victory (61% vs. 29%) helped pull him over the line.

Meanwhile, Joseph P. Kennedy, III is poised to become the most prominent young Democratic politician of his generation—and a strong advocate for the continued assault on the country that has been so very good to his family—a country they may well have ruined beyond repair.

Matthew Richer (email him) is a writer living in Massachusetts. He is the former American Editor of Right NOW magazine.